Other Stuff

If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the President of Stanford will throw in a tour, and then you can drive by Intel or some Clean Tech firm for a photo op standing in front of an impressive looking piece of equipment.

The “official dignitary” tour of Silicon Valley is like taking the jungle cruise at Disneyland and saying you’ve been to Africa. Because you and your entourage don’t know the difference between large innovative companies who once were startups (Google, Facebook, et al) and a real startup, you never really get to see what makes the valley tick.

If you didn’t come in your own 747, here’s a guide to what to see in the valley (which for the sake of this post, extends from Santa Clara to San Francisco.) This post offers things to see/do for two types of visitors: I’m just visiting and want a “tourist experience” (i.e. a drive by the Facebook / Google / Zynga / Apple building) or “I want to work in the valley” visitor who wants to understand what’s going on inside those buildings.

I’m leaving out all the traditional stops that you can get from the guidebooks.

Hackers’ Guide to Silicon ValleySilicon Valley is more of a state of mind than a physical location. It has no large monuments, magnificent buildings or ancient heritage. There are no tours of companies or venture capital firms. From Santa Clara to South San Francisco it’s 45 miles of one bedroom community after another. Yet what’s been occurring for the last 50 years within this tight cluster of suburban towns is nothing short of an “entrepreneurial explosion” on par with classic Athens, renaissance Florence or 1920’s Paris.

Palo Alto – The Beating Heart 1Start your tour in Palo Alto. Stand on the corner of Emerson and Channing Street in front of the plaque where the triode vacuum tube was developed. Walk to 367 Addison Avenue, and take a look at the HP Garage. Extra credit if you can explain the significance of both of these spots and why the HP PR machine won the rewrite of Valley history.

Walk to downtown Palo Alto at lunchtime, and see the excited engineers ranting to one another on their way to lunch. Cram into Coupa Café full of startup founders going through team formation and fundraising discussions. (Noise and cramped quarters basically force you to listen in on conversations) or University Café or the Peninsula Creamery to see engineers working on a startup or have breakfast in Il Fornaio to see the VC’s/Recruiters at work. Take a photo in front “Lucky 165 University Ave”early office of Google, PayPal, Logitech.

Mountain View – The Beating Heart 2Head to Mountain View and drive down Amphitheater Parkway behind Google, admiring all the buildings and realize that they were built by an extinct company, Silicon Graphics, once one of the hottest companies in the valley (Shelley’s poem Ozymandias should be the ode to the cycle of creative destruction in the valley.) Next stop down the block is the Computer History Museum. Small but important, this museum is the real deal with almost every artifact of the computing and pre-computing age (make sure you check out their events calendar.) On leaving you’re close enough to Moffett Field to take a Zeppelin ride over the valley. If it’s a clear day and you have the money after a liquidity event, it’s a mind-blowing trip.

Lunch time on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View is another slice of startup Silicon Valley. Hang out at the Red Rock Café at night to watch the coders at work trying to stay caffeinated. If you’re still into museums and semiconductors, drive down to Santa Clara and visit the Intel Museum.

Sand Hill Road – Adventure CapitalWhile we celebrate Silicon Valley as a center of technology innovation, that’s only half of the story. Startups and innovation have exploded here because of the rise of venture capital. Think of VC’s as the other equally crazy half of the startup ecosystem. (Silicon Valley accounts for 42 percent of the venture capital in the U.S.)

You can see VC’s at work over breakfast at Bucks in Woodside, listen to them complain about deals over lunch at Village Pub or see them rattle their silverware at Madera. Or you can eat in the heart of old “VC central” in the Restaurant 3000 at 3000 Sand Hill Road. While you’re there, walk around 3000 Sand Hill looking at all the names of the VC’s on the building directories and be disappointed how incredibly boring the outside of these buildings look. (Some VC’s have left the Sand Hill Road womb and have opened offices in downtown Palo Alto and San Francisco to be closer to the action.) For extra credit, stand outside one of the 3000 Sand Hill Road buildings wearing a sandwich-board saying “Will work for equity” and hand out copies of your executive summary and PowerPoint presentations.

Drive by the Palo Alto house where Facebook started (yes, just like the movie) and the house in Menlo Park that was Google’s first home. (While in Menlo Park see the new Facebook headquarters.) Drive down to Cupertino and circle Apple’s campus. No tours but they do have an Apple company store which doesn’t sell computers but is the only Apple store that sells logo’d T-shirts and hats.

BTW, if you on Sand Hill Road take some time and drive to the coast via Hwy 84 for a quintessential California mountain road. Go south on Hwy 1 stopping in Pescadero (one-block town out of the 19th century) eat at Duartes, then continue to Santa Cruz. If it’s elephant seal season stop at Ano Nuevo State Park. In Santa Cruz go to the Boardwalk (an amusement park over 100 years old) and then go to Henry Cowell State Park to see the giant redwoods.

South San Francisco – Biotech HeavenIf you drive the hour up to San Francisco you’ll pass through South San Francisco. It’s best known for the sign on the hillside north of the airport that says, “The Industrial City.” Yet in a two-square-mile industrial zone, the city boasts 72 biotech firms. Genentech, Elan Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, Cell Genesys, Cytokinetics, Rigel, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Solazyme, Catalyst Biosciences.

San Francisco – Startups with a LifestyleContinue up to San Francisco and park next to South Park in the South of Market area. South of Market (SoMa) is the home address and the epicenter of Web 2.0 startups. If you’re single, living in San Francisco and walking/biking to work to your startup definitely has some advantages/tradeoffs over the rest of the valley. Café Centro is South Park’s version of Coupa Café. Or eat at the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen. (You’re just a few blocks from the S.F. Giants ballpark. If it’s baseball season take in a game in a beautiful stadium on the bay.) And four blocks north is Moscone Center, the main San Francisco convention center. Go to a trade show even if it’s not in your industry.

See the Exploratorium: A great hands-on science museum. Lots of kids, but I still love going there and getting my mind blown.

Visit the California Academy of Sciences: Recently rebuilt, this place is practically a temple to the glories of the natural sciences. Live penguins, a rainforest, impossibly gorgeous aquatic habitats, a great planetarium, and more. Thursday nights they have a DJ and serve drinks, which means the hordes of tots are absent.

If you got time drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and see the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model. It’s a giant hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay.

BerkeleyWhile Stanford was becoming an outward facing technology university in the 1950’s and ’60’s Berkeley, east of San Francisco and across the Bay wasfacing inward. Why? It’s technology products were nuclear weapons. Berkeley has since turned its gaze outward and entrepreneurship is blossoming in all departments. Take a tour of the Lawrence Berkeley Labratory — for Nobel prizes, museum and sight seeing. Walk the grounds of the 1964 free speech movement: Sproul Plaza, Sather Gate and Telegraph Avenue. Check out Cory Hall and Wozniak/Soda Hall for the birthplace of CAD, BSDUnix and MEMS.

The Valley is about the Interactions Not the BuildingsLike the great centers of innovation, Silicon Valley is about the people and their interactions. It’s something you really can’t get a feel of from inside your car or even walking down the street. You need to get inside of those building and deeper inside those conversations. Here’s a few suggestions of how to do so.

If you want the ultimate startup experience, see if you can talk yourself into carrying someone’s bags as they give a pitch to a VC. Be a fly on the wall and soak it in.

If you’re trying to get a real feel of the culture, apply and interview for jobs in three Silicon Valley companies even if you don’t want any of them. The interview will teach your more about Silicon Valley company culture and the valley than any tour.

Go to at least three tech-oriented Meetups or Plancast events in the Valley or San Francisco (Meetup is a deep list. Search for “startup” meetup’s in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Santa Clara.)

Do you know of anyone who is teaching entrepreneurship as an adaptable process that includes theory/practice in gap assessment, opportunity recognition, feasibility testing, etc.? I am charged with developing a such a course for high school students. This course (or series of classes) will be anchored with project-based learning and community engagement as well.

I’ve been working with small business start ups since 1982, teaching beginning business classes. My issue with the way the SBA and the typical SBDC teaches start up courses ~ they re-package an MBA info a short course that doesn’t really focus on what the owner of a start really needs to know. My philosophy is you need to know how to manage the money and how to work with customers – everything else is secondary. My blog is http://smartstartbusiness.blogspot.com/. I want my blog to really deal with the very basics. How to read and act on a financial report (not how to write one) and how to get inside the heads of your prospects. Real KISS stuff.

My question is this: would you be willing to be an adviser in this project? If not, could I occasionally forward a question your way?

I’m working on a web startup and need to know some of the basics like financial, accounting and legal initial setup. can you give some insight? how does one structure a web startup to take full advantage of tax code, options to bring on investors or sell, and legally protect from competition and such.

Mark – the focus on entrepreneurship blogs tends to be business started by members of Richard Florida’s “Creative Class”. My focus has been and is businesses in the Fringe Economy – selling legal products without the benefit of licenses, permits and so on – and individuals starting traditional small business that don’t need or expect VC, and often don’t need to incorporate. Individuals running full or part time businesses represent over one half of all business tax filings. These businesses are my focus.

Having said that, consider looking for a support group of tech start ups in non-competing businesses. They share ideas and experience, which is a whole lot cheaper than consultants. However, DO talk with an attorney and an insurance broker to just cover your ass before you go too far. A number of MBA programs offer student consulting services, again a cheap alternative. SCORE and ACE are pretty well-meaning folks, but I wouldn’t go that direction.

Industry associations are a source of basic data even to non-members. You might check the appropriate national association for your business.

The trip to Silicon Valley to meet and pitch to a few brand name venture capitalists sounds great. But until then, how can we gain you as the keynote at our upcoming Entrepreneurs, Inventors & Innovators Conf. at Western Ky University in Bowling Green, KY in April 2012?

Strange isn’t it that you should include driving up Sand Hill Road for some AdVenture Capital and never once mention the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory dominating one side of the road. Home to Nobel prize winning research, the laboratory has fueled science and technology in Silicon Valley for 60 years. It is hard to imagine Silicon Valley without SLAC’s RF klystrons (Varian), or the famous Homebrew computer club (Apple), the first North American World Wide Web server, or the first synchrotron radiation laboratory for nanotechnology.
The two mile long linear accelerator is a landmark visible from outer space, so surely worth a glance as you drive up Sand Hill Road heading towards the 280.